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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#371

Post by ionforce »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #122
ts330 wrote: post #26

Considering that it's our fellow programmers doing the interviewing, I'd say we're failing ourselves here. I'd wager that in almost all cases, those doing interviews have had zero training on effectively recruiting anyone (let alone other developers). An effective interview requires preparation - and I bet the majority of developers do this right between saying " fuck , have they arrived already?" and starting the in…

I guess the take-home lesson here is that programmers have no idea what makes a good programmer and how to screen for one. So they fall back to the basics, CS 101.

> programmers have no idea what makes a good programmer

I disagree. I think we do know what we want, but there is no cheap/easy litmus test for this. If time, money, and opportunity were free, the way to find out if someone is a good programmer is to work with them for a long time.

Okay, now find a cheap way to do that while both sides of the interview have to juggle full time jobs and other interviews.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#372

Post by stuxnet79 »

dryajov wrote: post #335

Honestly, I believe the industry is cannibalizing it self, and this sort of practices is pushing out more and more creative and capable people. When I have to make a choice of whether to practice my algorithms or work on my open source project, is when things are going to start blowing up. This industry is built by people with passion and dedication, some of the most powerful and defining projects were built by indiv…

Ha, I'm in this exact predicament. I'm having a lot of fun working on my side-project during evenings but if I'm to stay employable I understand I'm going to also have to refresh my memory on algo fundamentals. But this is much lower priority to me right now and I agree with you that interviews are getting ridiculous.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#373

Post by ionforce »

illumin8 wrote: post #91
eterm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a disastrous phone interview this week throughout which I remained calm and focused but immediately after putting the phone down I emailed the recruiter to say I wasn't interested. The "Technical" part was just trivia. Never-mind that I was sat in front of a computer and could have googled everything asked, I chose not to do that. So yes, I stumbled when asked "what does the using keyword do". I explained how i…

The first Google phone screen for SRE candidates is so scripted that you can probably Google the questions and get exact answers. It's been years since I've had it, but I remember it being the exact same questions, about UNIX internals and TCP/IP. This type of recruiting seriously turns me off because you can tell they're hiring minimum wage call center workers to read a script and filter out the 9/10 candidates that…

But maybe they encounter so much noise in their hiring process that this actually is the correct process at scale.

It may minimize "humanity" for potential interviewees, but it optimizes for lack of heart ache on their end.

Is my guess.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#374

Post by snappy173 »

ckozlowski wrote: post #150
49531 wrote: post #80

Technical interviews became 10x easier when I realized that most companies aren't necessarily looking for the right answer as much as they are trying to look into your mind. As a self taught programmer things like binary search trees and linked lists are a foreign concepts (especially as a self taught frontend developer). When I am asked to solve a problem in a way I've never encountered before, people are pretty ope…

>Technical interviews became 10x easier when I realized that most companies aren't necessarily looking for the right answer as much as they are trying to look into your mind. This is a great, great point. I'd like to add one more: Admitting when you don't know the answer. I've been in a number of recent phonescreens where we'd ask a technical question of a simple "good/bad" sort. My advise to those reading: If you do…

> I'd like to add one more: Admitting when you don't know the answer

I'll +1 this, but with a slight caveat. Some interviewers don't get it, and will ding you for this. Those are the companies to avoid.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#375

Post by halis »

I interviewed with Netflix for a front-end JavaScript position a few years ago. I had two technical phone screens. One with the engineering manager and another with a senior engineer on their team.

Those went smoothly so I was asked to fly out to Los Gatos, CA.

On-site I was supposed to talk first with the senior engineer I had already interviewed with over the phone. He was out sick so they changed at the last minute.

In walks a guy in a fedora with full tattoo sleeves. He glances at my resume and laughs saying he hasn't looked at it at all and really knows nothing about me.

He proceeds to ask me detailed questions about Node.js. I told him that I was very clear with them on the phone, that I've played around with Node, but I hadn't used it to any serious degree (at that point in my career).

He continued with the Node.js questions for a while, some of which I knew because they were the same as the browser (console) some of which I wasn't familiar with at the time (EventEmitter).

He then asked me some simple JavaScript, Backbone, CSS questions all of which were easy. He then asked me a C# question and I knew that too.

We shook hands and after he left, the engineering manager came back in and I was basically escorted out. He said I was good but that I wasn't what they were looking for.

I've had some retarded interview experiences but that one took the cake.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#376

Post by wdewind »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #370
wdewind wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BFS queues are not particularly difficult to describe, and deciding whether or not to do breadth or depth first is something I think about all the time. Frequently, for instance, in data access patterns, that decision can have a very big effect on performance. I can't agree that it's a random trivia question. Edit: Ok, let me add some nuance here. I think we both probably agree that implementing a shortest path algo…

Hmm, their difficulty is irrelevant. Your experience (like everyone's) is anecdotal and not representative of the immense fields of CS and SE that no one person can know all of, but could certainly look up. If you are looking for a computer scientist, ask for one in the job req. No shame in that, it would save everyone time.

I added a sneaky edit (sorry!) that may address some of this, so I think we probably largely agree. I'm responding to a relatively specific claim, frequently heard by bootcampers and inexperienced engineers in web development, that foundational CS isn't useful, which my experience is somewhat representative of, though you are correct it's still anecdotal.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#377

Post by icedchai »

ionforce wrote: post #356
collyw wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persistence is a pain in the arse if you have to spend 1.5 hours every Hackerrank challenge (plus you are likely to want a warm up of at least half an hour). Say you have to do ten of those. Why can't employers ask you to bring in some previous work and discuss it? Surely that is a lot more relevant than algorithmic stuff that you likely haven't used for years.

> bring in some previous work Surely your prior work is under some sort of NDA? It's all proprietary (unless it is open source).

You'd think people would respect NDA's, right? Not so... I've had people submit proprietary code samples during the interview process.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#378

Post by ruaree »

vdnkh wrote: post #361

It took me a year to find a new job. I got rejected from on-sites 8 or 9 times, a few other rejections before that. I've been through everything the OP has and more. I was once forgotten in an interview room while my interviewer played foosball and then went home. I've managed to pass all rounds with "positive feedback" only to get rejected three days later. I've swam through rivers of aerated bullshit to find a new…

> In my previous phone screen they were looking to hire a single person.The perfect fit. Probably not me

What country was this in? In Ireland that qualifies as employment discrimination on the "civil status" ground.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#379

Post by tptacek »

I'm torn.

On the one hand: the interview processes this post describes are hilariously broken. Stand up at a whiteboard and implement breadth-first search from memory! You know, like no programmer at their desk staring at their editor ever does. I think "that's the one where you use a queue, right?" is a fully valid and complete answer to that dumb question.

I also think you're within your rights to demand that your interviewer implement Kruskal's minimum cost spanning tree from memory at the same whiteboard before you have to do BFS. That's an extremely simple and important graph theory algorithm that nobody memorizes either.

These interviews are nerd status rituals. Really good candidates know this and game them. If you know anyone like this, ask them for stories. I've heard some great ones. But obviously, this isn't a good way to select software developers.

On the other hand...

The idea that "front-end developers" shouldn't need to be able to implement a BFS (at all) bothers me a lot. If you're a software developer, you should grok basic conceptual computer science. You should be able to work with a graph. If you're doing web work, you're working with graphs all day whether you grok that or not!

I've been doing front-end work for the past month, and I've had to do more low-level profiling and performance work here than in the previous 4 years of low-level systems work.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#380

Post by ktRolster »

bpchaps wrote: post #286
ktRolster wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the author has issues with, but instead the attitude, stress durability, expectations to the world around him. That seems like a reasonable interpretation, emphasized by when he got through all the programming questions without a problem, and still didn't get the job. One thing I've found when I'm interviewing, I try to be enthusiastic and act like I really want to work at the company, even when it's a boring company…

Do you have any idea how easy it is to tell when someone's doing that? Or going even further, how exhausting this is for someone who's not good at it? Why not just be genuine?

Or going even further, how exhausting this is for someone who's not good at it? Why not just be genuine?

Yes, I do. I don't act genuine because when I'm my genuine self, I glare at everyone in the room with the rage of a thousand suns.

I don't know if people can tell that I'm hiding it or not, but when I try to hide and act enthusiastic, I get the job, when I don't, I don't.

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